Scaling Great User Experiences 🦄
Why does it involve heroics to ship products with a great UX? What are the technical an organizational challenges involved? Cheng Lou goes deep on this and more.
Hi everyone - if you are involved in building and shipping software, you probably empathize with the following thought:
Shipping a product with a great UX is difficult. In the end, what ends up being shipped is the result of many compromises and death by a thousand cuts.
How did we end up here? Modern technology and organizational optimizations were heralded as the solution that would make shipping great user experiences the norm. Somewhere something went off the rails.
To dive into this complicated topic in much greater detail, I sit down and chat with Cheng Lou. Cheng has been one of the few voices who has been both articulating these challenges as well as working on foundational technologies to find solutions to these challenges across multiple directions.
Below is the full video where he and I go deep on this (and more!) topics:
If you want a format besides video, you can also listen to our chat on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more - just click here.
Also, for links to some choice moments, check out these curated sections.
Building a Performant and Stunning Art Gallery
On the more technical side, one of the topics that we touched upon was how he built his super smooth and animation-filled art gallery:
At around the 54 minute mark, we discuss his thought process and design decisions that went into it. Here are some details that will make your 🤯: No framework or library was involved. All of this is built with less than a few hundred lines of code!
It scores well on the Lighthouse metrics as well:
I have been a long-time skeptic that web apps can compete with native apps when it comes to creating the kinds of user experiences that are filled with smooth animations and transitions. Cheng’s gallery definitely makes me reconsider my position.
Conclusion
It takes heroics to ship great products with a great user experience. The larger the organization you are operating in, the more likely this is the case. It takes revisiting the technical, organizational, and incentive-based structures that teams operate in to ensure the intended UI and UX vision is preserved.
A great proxy for where your team stands on this is to see what priority UI and UX fit-and-finish bugs are assigned:
Head over to my Twitter poll on this and share your vote and/or thoughts.
Also, if you don’t mind, please Like or Retweet my original tweet with Cheng to get the Twitter algorithm to show it to more people.
Cheers,
Kirupa 😀